Album Review: Kristin Chenoweth – Coming Home (2014)

 

“A most unusual coloring book”

Kristin Chenoweth has been delighting audiences across musical theatre, television shows and concert tours for many years now and so one can forgive her the indulgence of a live album. Coming Home was recorded in her hometown of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma and covers the widest range of musical influences that have shaped her life and career.

So we get songs from her Broadway hits, wish fulfilment of songs she’s always wanted to perform, a dip into the country and Christian music of her upbringing, not to mention some disco and Dolly Parton too. It’s an eclectic mixture but one which proves revelatory, not just because of the many spoken interludes included here but because of the sheer joy of Chenoweth’s extraordinary soprano voice.

And that is in evidence right from the start of this 15 track collection. You might not think you need to hear another version of ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ or ‘Maybe This Time’ but she soars magnificently through both, exercising the full heft of her upper register to glorious effect and bringing particularly new life to the latter track. 

Phantom’s ‘Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again’ similarly shines and she thoroughly owns Les Misérables ‘Bring Him Home’, a surprising but effective choice. And she pays nice tribute to Wicked with an amusingly multilingual version of ‘Popular’ and a duet on ‘For Good’ with a local singer named Axyl Langford (who sadly might not be too keen to preserved this way…).

The swerves away from musical theatre offer up some lovely moments too. Parton’s ‘Little Sparrow’ is beautifully done and the folkier songs ‘Fathers and Daughters’ and ‘Hard Times Come Again No More’ have a charming unaffected directness to them, offering up a fascinating balance to a record that feels like a real insight into Chenoweth as a performer and indeed, as a person.

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